Senior year was probably the most hectic, stressful time of my life thus far: between finishing graduation requirements, college applications, and beginning the transition real life while starting to let go of people that had been fixtures in day to day life, my brain was frazzled, and nearly every time someone asked my plans for after high school I almost screamed and sprinted in the opposite direction.
But the biggest trend towards the end of the year was an influx of people telling me, and several of my friends, just how lucky we were. I was lucky to be valedictorian, my friend was lucky to receive a full ride through merit scholarships, we were all lucky to get into the colleges we wanted, lucky, lucky, lucky.
Our success was not luck. Our success was hard work.
Of course I feel that my friends and I are immensely privileged to have been chosen from among thousands of qualified students, and it brings me to tears to think about how slim the chances were and how rare and extraordinary our opportunities are. The concept in and of itself is amazing--I’m blown away by the future before us.
But we worked ourselves to exhaustion for four years. The all nighters I pulled to finish taking notes and study for exams were not luck. The thousands of flash cards, the nights I got home from work at eleven only to spend hours annotating, the twenty pound backpacks, none of that was luck.
The athletes I know who brought textbooks on the bus to study on the way to games and were on the field or court until ten the night before an exam, the scholars I know who spent all of high school doing nothing but studying--that will never be luck.
Luck is winning the Powerball, or finding a ten dollar bill on the ground. Luck is meeting someone cool at summer camp, luck is having a class with your best friend, luck is winning at Go Fish. Luck is not something we’ve worked for our entire lives.
It’s not fair to discredit the sweat behind merit--and this is a concept that stretches so far beyond high school, to business owners and the working class when the time and energy they’re willing to put in finally pays off. I feel like we as a whole should re-evaluate the way we look at things; we have this intrinsic pessimism that is all we’ve ever known, and has shaped the lens with which we view the world, and to truly appreciate and understand the multitudes of people around us we have to try on a new lens.
So no, I don’t agree that we were all lucky. I don’t agree that a woman who works seventy hours a week and receives a long awaited promotion is lucky, and I don’t agree that a man who saves and saves to get a new car is lucky. All of that success was earned.
